If you’ve followed politics for more than 20 minutes or so — and especially if you were unfortunate enough to witness the Presidential debate on September 10th — you know disastrously inept political administrations blame their disastrous failures on the administrations of their predecessors. “Well, we inherited [fill in unmitigated bullshit here].” Then they promise they’ll fix their disastrous failures if you’ll be good enough to contract amnesia and re-elect them. It’s pretty formulaic at this point.
And so it is that the incumbent Vice President and Presidential candidate wants you to forget her track record of the past four years (which won’t take long because she has no track record) and to take her word for it that everything will be butterflies, rainbows, sunny skies, peaches, cream, milk, honey, and hunky-dory if we give her four more years to do nothing. She won’t do nothing, of course. She’ll tax, spend, and borrow us into oblivion while her minions tell the people who oppose her they’re offensive, racist, misogynistic troglodytes who can’t tell truth from fiction, realism from cynicism, and empiricism from ideology. See how that works? Pretty neat, huh?
The VP and her minions will also be happy if you ignore Exhibit A below because (1) everybody is entitled to their own truth and (2) all those things in Exhibit A are just numbers. Wow! It turns out ignorance isn’t just bliss, it’s also economic suicide. How’s that for a Daily Double? Come on. Step right up, folks. Everybody’s a winner.
Exhibit A
It’s Only Money
It’s accepted as generally true that money can’t buy happiness. But it can buy a shitload of votes, especially if you promise people whatever they want and convince them to ignore the reckless cost of fulfilling those promises. That’s why the incumbent Vice President and current candidate for President, along with her minions, want you to ignore Exhibit B below.
Exhibit B
Oddly enough, Exhibit B bears an uncanny resemblance to Exhibit C, which is Michael Mann’s infamous hockey-stick graph. The only difference between the two is that Exhibit B isn’t a fabrication based on a combination of cherry-picked data and stacked-deck modeling. But then again, Exhibit B is just numbers.
Exhibit C, RCraig09, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Orange Man Bad
Be that as it may, everybody who wants the incumbent Vice President to spend four more years running the ship of state aground knows Trump already ruined everything.
Beyond that he’s a threat to democracy. He’ll never leave the White House if he ever steps foot in there again. He’ll end Social Security and Medicare. He’ll eliminate the Departments of Energy, Education, Justice, the Interior, and Veterans Affairs. He’ll legalize racism, transphobia, and jaywalking. He’ll ban whistling in the corridors on Capitol Hill. He’ll make helping old ladies across the street a capital offense. And he’ll require everyone in the United States, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to dye their hair orange.
Besides, we can’t run the risk of lowering inflation and decreasing unemployment. We can’t defend our Constitutional freedoms and support Israel. We can’t make energy sources for domestic manufacturing reliable and create more private-sector jobs. We can’t stop throwing money at climate change. We can’t require IDs or proof of citizenship to vote. We can’t have one Election Day instead of an indefinite election season that stops only when all the votes we like (or have manufactured) are in. And we certainly can’t deport illegal aliens, reclaim our national sovereignty, and make our foreign enemies respect us. People won’t think we’re nice.
Look. We have a Republic to save here, kids. And the only way we’re going to save it is by continuing to kill it the way we’ve been killing it the past four years. After all, if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. And we’ll be just fine as long as we keep borrowing the eggs we use from the Golden Geese.
Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. (Herbert Hoover)
Orange Man Good